Good morning, Watermark. How are we doing this morning? Come on. In the rain, you made it here. Well done. Hey, my name is Tyler, and I've been serving on our Porch team on Tuesday nights as the director of discipleship for about two months now. My family and I just moved from Katy, Texas, about two months ago, and we are so glad to be a part of the Watermark family.
Since it's Every Generation July, I know it's typical to show a picture of your family. That preschool video just inspired me. I want to show a little video of my family, but I want to give some background context. This was a few months ago. I'm driving home from work. As I turn the corner onto our street, my kids are out in front waiting for me, which is the best as a dad. As I turn the corner, they just start dancing, which is nice, so I take out my phone and start to record it, and this is what I see. Watch this.
[Video]
What in the world? I'm like, "Jen, what are you teaching these kids when I'm not here?" Here's why I show that video. I have a 5-year-old, a 4-year-old, and a 2-year-old doing the Stanky Leg. It's Every Generation July. We have a lot of generations in this room. Here's what I want you to know. It could get a little loud this morning. It could get a little chaotic, and you will get zero judgment from me. Zero. Unless your kid gets up and starts doing the Stanky Leg, you're good.
Here's what I also want to say to the kids. Welcome to what your parents are doing on a regular basis in this room as we worship Jesus, just like you're doing over there. We just want to say you are welcome here. Can we thank the kiddos for being here this morning? Hey, if you have a Bible, go ahead and open your Bible to the book of Ecclesiastes. We're taking the whole year, as a church, to walk chapter by chapter through the whole Bible together. This past week, we went through the book of Ecclesiastes.
Parents, I just want to say this. As you're turning to Ecclesiastes, I want to encourage you. I grew up in a family as the oldest of five kids in six years. There were some twins in there. My parents weren't in ministry, and my parents didn't have a lot of time, but as I look back, now having young kids, my parents prioritized two things.
They prioritized, first, as often as we could, to gather around the dinner table at night. Even if it was 15 or 20 minutes to spend time together, they prioritized that. Secondly, more than they told us as kids to read the Bible, they modeled it. I'm sure my parents told me a lot of things, and I'm sure I went to a lot of sermons, but if I'm honest, if you were to test me on those things, I bet I wouldn't remember much.
Do you know what I remember? I remember, as a young boy, coming downstairs and seeing my mom reading her Bible. I remember my dad coming down the stairs, wanting to talk to him, and he's praying, and then inviting me, "Hey, buddy. Let's pray together." My parents were not perfect, but the thing I remember to this day is what they modeled.
It doesn't matter as much what we say up here, or what you say, if you're not modeling it for your kids. Here's the deal. We all stumble. We all fail. The past is the past, but tomorrow is a new day. We're starting a brand-new book of the Bible, Isaiah. Come on. Jump in, and would your kids see you reading the Bible. So, we're going to jump in. Let me pray, and then we're going to jump in together.
Would you start by just praying for yourself and saying, "God, would you speak to me this morning?" Then, would you pray for those around you and pray that they would encounter the presence of God this morning? Then, would you pray for me that I would speak God's Word with boldness and clarity?
God, we long to encounter you this morning. Lord, if we're honest, as we've looked at the past eight days and watched the news in our very state, God, we are brokenhearted over what people in the state of Texas have endured in these floods. God, we're just begging you. God, we need to hear from you. O God, we are desperate to have an encounter with you this morning through your Word, and I believe Ecclesiastes is exactly what we need to hear. So would you speak, Lord? Speak. We long to hear from you. In Jesus' name, amen.
Ecclesiastes, chapter 1. We're going to pick it up in verse 1. It says, "The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem." Right at the beginning of the book, we have an understanding of who is trying to talk to us. There's actually an author who's unknown who's quoting a preacher. He says the Preacher is a son of David, king in Jerusalem. Many people would say this Preacher is actually King Solomon. Other people would say, "Ah, we're not sure."
Whoever this person is, we know they're in the line of David, and we're going to find out throughout the book that this person is rich, this person is wise, and this person is old. So, it's an old, wise person at the end of their life, going, "I've learned a few things, and I want to impart them to you." I don't know if you've ever been around someone at the very end of their life, but what they say is telling. It would be wise for us to listen to what this wise older person has to say.
So, we meet the Preacher, and then we hear his message. Look at verse 2. This is what the Preacher says. "Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever." Verse 9: "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun."
We hear this older wise guy start to talk, and he says, "Vanity of vanities. Everything is vanity. Nothing is new." You go, "Okay, okay. It's an old guy who's at the end of his life, just a grouchy old man." Yet, when you study what he's saying, it's fascinating, and it's a message we need to hear today. The word vanity is the Hebrew word hebel, which is typically translated meaningless or vanity, but it's actually vapor or mist or smoke. It's the idea of being on a cold day and breathing out. You see the breath, you try to grab it, and it's gone.
There's actually a different picture I want to paint, especially with families in the room. This is a safe place. How many of you are Buc-ee's families? Anybody? This is safe. Okay. Some of you were like, "Is this okay?" Yes, it's okay. Now, here's what I've learned about Buc-ee's. You know Buc-ee's. It's like Walmart meets Disney in a gas station. Some of you love Buc-ee's. My wife and I… We're a Buc-ee's family. We love to stop there. Others of you, like my brother and sister-in-law, judge the Buc-ee's people and go to the cooler spots.
Regardless, for you fellow Buc-ee's people, everything in Buc-ee's is expensive except two things. There are the animal crackers called Beaver Buddies, and there's the cotton candy. They're both $1.59. Those are the only things, so they're the only things I let my kids get. It's animal crackers or red dye. That's it.
They always go for the red 40 dye. It's in this big bucket of cotton candy. It's so funny watching my kids. They leave Buc-ee's. They're all excited. They get in the car. They bust open the top. It takes them about 3.2 seconds to bust through that whole bucket of cotton candy before it's gone and they're left with sticky fingers. Right? I think what Solomon, or whoever the writer, the Preacher is…
He's saying life is a lot like a Buc-ee's bucket of cotton candy. It looks so enticing and so filling and so good. Then you start to eat it, and you go, "This doesn't have as much substance as I would have thought. This is leaving my hands a little sticky. To be totally honest, I'm still as hungry as when I started." He's saying life is a lot like that. The very shiny thing you're chasing in your job, in your career, in your car, even in your relationships and wisdom, is cotton candy in the end.
Then he proves it to us over the next 12 chapters of the book. We don't have time this morning to go through the whole thing. I've just summarized quickly the five cotton candies, the five vanities, he says in all of life we tend to chase. We're going to go through them quickly. I just want you to think. Which one of these are you prone to or maybe are you chasing right now in your life and God is trying to free you from that? Here it is.
1. Pleasure. Look at Ecclesiastes, chapter 2, starting in verse 1. "I said in my heart, 'Come now, I will test you with pleasure; enjoy yourself.' But behold, this also was vanity." Verse 10: "And whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil. Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun."
Did you catch what he said in verse 10? "Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them." He says, "I tried it all…parties, food, laughter, relationships, alcohol, entertainment, music…everything. Whatever I wanted, I went for. When Netflix said, 'Do you want to keep watching?' I always said 'Yes.' Always."
Some of you hear that and go, "Oh, the life." Right? "I don't have to just go to the lake for a weekend; I could go for the rest of my life. I don't have to have a steak dinner just on special occasions; that's every dinner. I don't have to go golfing once a month; it's every night." The writer says, "No, I tried that. I had it all. Whatever my heart wanted, I went after it. It was like filling up on sugar, just being hungry for more." He says it was all vanity in the end.
2. Career. Look at Ecclesiastes 2:18. "I hated all my toil in which I toil under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to the man who will come after me, and who knows whether he will be wise or a fool? Yet he will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity. So I turned about and gave my heart up to despair over all the toil of my labors under the sun…"
The writer, the Preacher, gave his identity to his work. He got his master's degree. He worked 70- to 80-hour workweeks. He maxed out his 401(k), and he retired at a young age filled with LinkedIn connections. At the end of that, he thought about it. "Wait. Where does this all lead? I work, work, work. I grind and grind, and then eventually I retire and die and give all that I've earned, all that I've worked for, to someone else. And who knows whether that person will be a fool."
He says in verse 20, "It led to my heart being filled with despair." Some of you have been there before. Even work, he says, which God created as a good thing, cannot carry the weight of our identity. It's cotton candy in the end.
3. Status. Ecclesiastes 2:9: "So I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem." "I did it. I was the best." Then he says in chapter 4, verse 4, "Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from a man's envy of his neighbor. This also is vanity and a striving after wind." The Preacher says he became great, better than everyone before him, and he realized something. He said, "I realized the hardest time that I worked was actually when I was envious and comparing myself to my neighbor. That was my primary motivation."
Back when I was in high school, I played football, and there was a guy I played football with who was my same body build. He looked similar to me, and we played the same position. His name was Kendall Stacks. I remember spring football came, and Kendall went and played baseball, and I was grinding in the midst of spring football. Then, the last week of spring ball, baseball ended, and he came back, and the coaches put him ahead of me. I remember thinking, "Nuh-uh. No way. Kendall is not going to steal my spot after being at baseball."
I remember tackling drills. This is a true story. He would be on one side, I would be on the other, and I would count how many people back he was. I would be like, "Okay. He's three back. I'm going to be three." When the tackling drill came, I'd just go and drive him into the ground. The coaches would go, "Wow, Moffett. All right, I see you." I earned the starting spot by just dreaming at night how I could crush Kendall Stacks. And it worked. But he was way better at baseball than me, so…whatever.
Let's be honest. How often do we use the fuel of comparison in our lives? We look at Instagram. We see the other parents are feeding their kids red 40 cotton candy, and we go, "I wouldn't do that, so I'm a better parent than them." Or you look at the vacations, and you see somebody who's going to the Caribbean, and you went to Galveston. You're going, "I'm a terrible parent. What am I doing with my life?" We're constantly living in comparison to others.
4. Wealth and possessions. In Ecclesiastes 5, he says, "He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity. When goods increase, they increase who eat them, and what advantage has their owner but to see them with his eyes?" This one we all know: it's never enough. The newer thing, the shiny object, is never enough.
I was thinking about Prime Day. Prime Day used to be one day. We're all going to tell our kids one day, "Yeah, Prime Day used to be one day." This week it was four days. We can't have just one day for Prime Day. We have to get more, more, more, yet it's never enough. There's always something to fix. There's always something to upgrade.
Jim Carrey famously said, "I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer." Jim Carrey and the Preacher in Ecclesiastes would agree. They would shake hands. It's not enough. It's not enough. These four are convicting, but they're also standard. It's the last one that's surprising.
5. Wisdom. Back in Ecclesiastes 1:16, the Preacher says, "I said in my heart, 'I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me, and my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.' And I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind. For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow."
He says, "Okay. There's pleasure and status and possessions, and there's also wisdom." Why? Because wisdom is a mixed bag. The more you learn something, the more you give your heart to understand, the more you realize you don't know. I thought I knew a lot about the Bible until I went to seminary. Some of you first-year parents think you know a lot about raising kids. Just wait until you have a toddler. Those who are older go, "Just wait until you have a teenager." Right? You think you know everything until you really begin to dive in.
Some of us have a little spot on our face or a bump on our arm, and we're not thinking a thing of it until we look at WebMD, and now we can't sleep at night. Right? Because wisdom is a mixed bag. The deeper you dive into it, the more you realize, "Oh, I didn't even know." The preacher is not anti-learning; he's just saying wisdom can't solve the ache in your soul.
As you look at those five…pleasure, career, status, wealth, possessions, or wisdom…which would you say, "I am prone to dive into that one"? The reality is this is the air we breathe today. Come on. In Dallas, Texas, this is the air we breathe. The writer of Ecclesiastes is trying to pull us out and say, "No. These things promise great things, like cotton candy, yet we're left in the end just as hungry as we were before." What do we do? In our last few minutes together, I believe the book of Ecclesiastes gives us two conclusions, two answers, to how to deal with hebel, with cotton candy, with this world we live in.
1. Embrace the season God has given you. Ecclesiastes 3:1: "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven…" Ecclesiastes 3:12: "I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God's gift to man."
Nine times in the book, the writer will say, "Find joy in your life." In a sense, accept the hebel of your life, and not only just in good times. Ecclesiastes 7:14: "In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider: God has made the one as well as the other, so that man may not find out anything that will be after him."
Which season are you in right now? Maybe, as you look at your life, you would go, "Man! My life is good." Then praise God and praise him for it. But some of you are in situations now where you would go, "I'm frustrated at the reality of my life. I wish things were different. My life as it is is not as it ought to be." The writer of Ecclesiastes would say, even in that, trust that God is working in the midst of your life.
When my son, my second born, my oldest son, Ty, was born, he spent the beginning of his life in the NICU (the neonatal ICU). I remember being so frustrated, if I'm honest, at the doctors, at the situation, and at God, just going, "God, as a dad, my job is to protect my little son, and I feel like I'm watching him tied up to machines, stuck in the hospital, not living life to the full. This is not as it should be."
It was in the middle of that moment God broke the hardness of my heart to where I finally, maybe for the first time in my life, surrendered and said, "God, I trust you are God and I am not God. If you have my son tied up to machines and that, in your good plan, is better, then I trust you." Do you know what happened in that moment? The hardness of my heart began to break. The situation didn't change, but I began to see "God, you're working in the midst of the mess."
I love what Tim Mackie says. He essentially says, "When I come to adopt a posture of total trust in God, it frees me to simply enjoy my life as I actually experience it, not as I think it ought to be." Even my expectations of what life ought to be are ultimately hebel. Everything under the sun is hebel. To some of us, that sounds like such a depressing word. I promise you, when we begin to trust God in the midst of our life as it is, not as it ought to be, God begins to show us light in the midst of the dark places.
He begins to transform the very thing you thought was evil, and God switches it (Genesis 50:20) for good. This is not silver-lining Christianity; this is God working in the midst of the mess. Not always waiting for the next thing or not always looking back, wishing I could go back, but embracing life as it is. Are you leveraging the season you're in for God's glory and for your good, knowing the season he has given you is a gift? It's a gift. And we're not home yet.
2. Live in light of the end. In Ecclesiastes 12:13-14, the last verses in the whole book, he says, "The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil."
Now, this is an interesting part of the book where the author, at the beginning, comes back and summarizes everything the Preacher has been saying, and then adds his own conclusion. He says, "The Preacher says, 'Vanity, vanity,' and he's right." Then the author says, "The end of the matter is to fear God, to keep his commands, to know that one day you're going to stand before a judge and he's going to make all things right. He will settle every account."
See, today, we pretend death is not coming. This is just the way we live in our society. We try to postpone it as long as possible. "Oh, no. I'm not going to age. I don't want to get closer to that moment." We pretend as though it doesn't exist. Yet we experience things like the past week when the reality of how fleeting life is slaps us across the face and we're forced to deal with this reality. Many of us don't like it. The author of Ecclesiastes is saying, "No, no, no, no. Life is found when you stare it in the face and deal with it."
It's interesting. This weekend, I went and got my hair cut, and I went to a different spot that I've never been to. I sat down, and a guy named Jose was cutting my hair. We're having a great conversation, Jose and I, just talking about life, and then he did the thing. I knew it was coming. He goes, "So, what do you do for work?" I'm like, "Here we go. It's coming." I'm like, "Well, I work at a church." I loved his response. He said, "How did you get into that?" I'm like, "Well, I was a finance major in college, and then God just started stirring my heart toward ministry."
As we started talking through it, he's like, "So, do you give speeches? Are you a priest? What do you do?" I'm like, "All right. We're at that level." I'm like, "Yeah." I said, "I'm actually speaking this weekend, and I'm talking about heaven." I said, "Jose, can I ask you a question?" I said, "If you were to stand before God tonight because your life was over, what would you say to him? I'm just curious."
He stopped cutting my hair. He's doing the fade, and he's like, "No, no." He's like, "Man! I never think about that." He said, "To be honest, I don't know." He said, "I know heaven is real. I know there's a God, but I don't know what I would say to him." He's just thinking. You know, we're there. There are a lot of people around. He goes, "I think I'd say I'm so sorry for everything I've done." He said, "Man, I've been a bad person. I've done some bad things. I just hope he'd let me in." That's what he said.
I'm going to get to the rest of our conversation, but I just want to ask that same thing to you. I mean, we're putting Jose on the spot, but let's put you on the spot for a second. We hate to think about this, but imagine you're driving home, and you don't make it home today. You stand before God in heaven, and you're having a conversation with God. What would you say? Or maybe, what would God say to you?
See, we don't tend to think about this, but this is the most important thing you can think about in your life, according to the Bible and according to Ecclesiastes. You want confidence that you know the answer of what you would say. Otherwise, we live with low-grade fear and anxiety of "Oh no. What will happen? What will happen?" The Bible says we can have confidence in that day because of what Jesus has done.
The rest of the story… What I told Jose was, "Hey, bro, can I be honest? You don't deserve to be in heaven." He went, "What?" I'm like, "You don't. You don't deserve it. But, Jose, neither do I. None of us deserve to be in heaven, but the crazy thing is… This is why we go crazy about Jesus." He had a cross tattoo on his wrist.
I go, "Do you know why we love that cross? Because Jesus stepped into our hebel, our humanity, our brokenness, and he took what you deserve, Jose. He took it on himself. He bore the punishment you deserve such that when you go to heaven, you just look at Jesus with tears in your eyes and go, 'It's because of him. It's only because of him that I can be in here.'
Do you know what he will say to you, Jose? He'll say, 'Come on in, man. Come on in. Come on in.' Because of what Jesus did, his blood that covers you, you are free in your life now. You have no fear of death because Jesus on that cross secured your place in heaven. Beyond that, you are righteous in his sight, and his blood covers you."
So, to those who don't know Jesus, I just want to lovingly ask you…Are you potentially living your life for cotton candy? It tastes good right now, but it will leave you hungry in the end. Maybe you need to think about that day when all of us will stand before God in heaven. To those who are believers, enjoy your cotton candy. Enjoy it. Just know it cost $1.59 and your Dad bought it for you. Enjoy it but live in light of that day. Let's pray.
Father, we thank you for what Jesus did, securing our place to where we no longer have to fear death. Yes, we revel in cotton candy, and things are nice, yet, God, your way is better. Teach us to fear you. We are not God; you are God. Help us embrace the life we actually have. God, we love you, we need you, and we trust you. In Jesus' name, amen.
